"California has stunned green advocates, by excluding rooftop solar from their renewable energy mandate."
Good. The mandate is for utilities. Homes and business are just the icing on the cake. Subsidies for homeowners went away a while ago, mission accomplished.
Over the last decade, most of the leading solar markets around the world have faced some kind of dramatic slowdown or freeze after starting out strong.
Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, and the Czech Republic have all had to suddenly adjust or eliminate incentive programs in recent years due to a frenzy of activity. In some cases, as in Spain and the Czech Republic, the solar industry virtually disappeared overnight after feed-in tariffs were retroactively rolled back.
American states such as Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New Jersey have also gone through their own boom-bust cycles as incentive programs were changed, or tradable credit markets collapsed.
And then there's California, which has had a much different experience.
While many solar incentive schemes have crashed and burned, California is quietly closing out its own state program two years ahead of schedule -- and hardly anyone has taken notice.
"The program ended with a whimper. The California Solar Initiative did exactly what it was supposed to do," said Bill Stewart, the president of SolarCraft, a solar installer based in Northern California.
- The California Solar Initiative (CSI) was created by the state's legislature in 2006 with strong support from then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had a vision of putting solar systems on 1 million roofs around the state. The goal of the CSI incentive program, implemented in 2007, was to support nearly 2,000 megawatts of residential and commercial projects by 2016.
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